Achieving Efficiency and Cost Savings Through a Strategic Outsourcing Partnership

Auchan is a global retail chain that stands out in the market with its wide product range, its food and non-food offer, and the services it provides to millions of customers every year. Behind that customer-facing scale sits a substantial internal IT and product organisation, running a constant portfolio of domestic and group-wide projects.

By 2022, the number of projects on Auchan Hungary's roadmap had grown to the point where the existing developer and project management team could no longer deliver everything on schedule. At the same time, the duration and number of future projects remained uncertain, which made committing to new permanent hires unattractive. The challenge was to expand delivery capacity quickly, on a flexible basis, without inflating long-term payroll or compromising on the seniority and domain knowledge required to integrate cleanly into Auchan's established engineering culture.

Rather than hiring permanent staff, Auchan chose to extend their team externally, on a monthly contract basis, and partnered with Wozify to source the right people. We began by selecting a PHP junior developer capable of working independently inside their internal team on a daily basis, and presented a shortlist from which Auchan made the final call. That developer has been embedded with the in-house team since the summer of 2022, contributing directly to ongoing and new projects.

In August 2023, when Auchan could not find a suitable IT project manager through their usual channels, they came back to us. We presented a curated list of candidates, from which they selected the PM who best matched the required technology, domain, and programme knowledge, with sufficient seniority to lead complex initiatives. The people we provide are managed day-to-day by Auchan and operate as full members of their team, while the commercial relationship remains a monthly contract with Wozify. The contracted developers sit within the client's lead developer team, giving Auchan the benefits of an internal resource with the flexibility of an external one.

Since the start of the cooperation, Auchan has gained thousands of hours of extra engineering and project management capacity, allowing them to push through the planned portfolio of domestic and corporate projects on time. Because these resources are contracted rather than employed, Auchan has realised an average annual cost saving of around 30% compared with the cost of equivalent in-house hires.

Just as importantly, the arrangement has helped Auchan stay inside their annual IT budget while still scaling delivery up and down in line with actual demand. The Wozify-sourced developer and project manager continue to operate as trusted members of their respective teams, proving that a well-matched, mentor-led staffing partnership can deliver the stability of an internal team with the cost profile and flexibility of an external one.